Mapping the Literary Lakes:

Lancaster University FASS news item, 27th November 2007

Researchers in FASS are working on a British Academy-funded project to bring together literary texts and digital technology. Dr Sally Bushell (Senior Lecturer in English Literature), Dr Ian Gregory (Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities) and
Dr David Cooper (Department of English and Creative Writing), have been awarded a Small Research Grant to develop a pilot scheme, ‘Mapping the Lakes: Towards a Literary GIS’. Their aim, in the first instance, is to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to map out textual representations of the Lake District.

Dr Cooper has recently completed a PhD within the Department of English and Creative Writing and says that the project builds upon his doctoral research: ‘My thesis focused on the work of the twentieth-century Cumbrian writer, Norman Nicholson, and the rewriting of the Lake District landscape. Whilst working on this, I became increasingly interested in the question of whether the creation of a literary GIS may help us think about the textual layering of place over time.’

For the pilot project, the team will map out two celebrated accounts of tours through the Lake District: Thomas Gray’s Journal from the autumn of 1769; and what Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to as his nine-day ‘circumcursion’ of the region in August 1802. Digital technology will be used to chart the writers’ movement through the terrain and to highlight the relationship between text and specific places. The project will also examine how both Gray and Coleridge describe locations which they do not visit: sites which exist exclusively in their respective imaginations.

Dr Gregory will create GIS maps which will be made available, as part of a project website, from April 2008. The team then hope to develop a more ambitious programme which will offer a comprehensive map of writing about the Lake District.

As Dr Cooper points out, the research may be site-specific, but it has wider theoretical potential: ‘Although we’re interested in how writers have responded to the singular topography of the Lakes, we’re also convinced that the GIS project will provide a template for general thinking about the literature of place. We believe that digital technology – including the constantly developing Google Earth – provides a medium for advancing our conceptual understanding of the connections between writers, texts and landscapes.’

As well as the creation of online resources, the team hope that a larger project will result in the publication of a major collection of essays, series of articles and a programme of interdisciplinary events.